


leaving nothing behind

by pyrophane



Category: NINE PERCENT (Band), 偶像练习生 | Idol Producer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Future Fic, M/M, The World's Briefest Jun Cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 01:08:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14008866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrophane/pseuds/pyrophane
Summary: He couldn’t imagine a final nine without Ziyi, because Ziyi was the person upon whom all of his faith rested, but he also couldn’t imagine a final nine without Zhengting, in the sense that it was only fitting for him to be there. An awareness of someone who was at least a little like you, when viewed from a distance, if not yet an acknowledgement.





	leaving nothing behind

**Author's Note:**

> 'canon compliant' as in 'takes place in (post-)canonverse'—this is entirely speculation, but i can hope, right?
> 
> title from seventeen's [lean on me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbjSLSiBKHs).
> 
> eta 07/04/18: updated the tags ;___;

 

 

 

 

 

“Are you looking for Justin?”

Xukun rears back, knuckles still poised to knock on the doorframe. “I—what?”

“Are you looking for Justin?” Zhengting repeats. He’s sprawled across the bottom bunk, leg dangling inelegantly off the edge. The phone in his hand casts an unsteady ellipse of light over his collarbone. “He went out with Ziyi—wait, but don’t you two have your weird psychic connection thing? Shouldn’t you already know that?”

“What? That’s not why I—why did you think—I don’t—” Zhengting gazes serenely at him. Xukun snaps his mouth shut to forestall the disaster of wherever that rapidly derailing train of thought was leading him, takes a breath, and salvages his bearings from the wreckage. “I’m not here for Justin,” he says. “I wanted to talk to you?”

Zhengting’s eyebrows disappear into his fringe. “Oh?” he says. A little cautious, now. He swings his legs off the bed and sits up. “What about?”

This is already the longest conversation they’ve had since the show ended with Xukun blinking away stars of light from the apex of the pyramid, hands braced against his knees, swallowing down his heart where it was caught in his throat. When Ziyi had been called the relief was like a blow to the gut, so devastatingly total he’d nearly forgotten to wrench his expression shut again the moment his own face appeared on the screens in high-definition close-up alongside Justin’s as the final candidates for centre, but as always muscle memory didn’t let him down. And muscle memory carried him past his new bandmates, all the way to the summit. The view from the top was unparalleled. It was what he had always wanted. It was with who he had always wanted.

Ziyi in the lower row and Xukun at the top and partway between them, the dark head of Zhu Zhengting, tilted towards Chengcheng in the seat beside him. Not something that drew the eye, necessarily. Only a signpost, something to tell you that you were on the right path. He couldn’t imagine a final nine without Ziyi, because Ziyi was the person upon whom all of his faith rested, but he also couldn’t imagine a final nine without Zhengting, in the sense that it was only fitting for him to be there. An awareness of someone who was at least a little like you, when viewed from a distance, if not yet an acknowledgement.

“I hadn’t actually gotten that far,” Xukun admits. “I thought you’d be taking advantage of the night off to get some sleep.”

“Wake up before the rooster, go to sleep after the thief,” Zhengting says cheerfully. “That’s the idol lifestyle, figured I’d better start adjusting.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be about lawyers,” Xukun says. “Also, wow, I’ve never heard anyone under the age of fifty actually say that.”

At this, Zhengting lets out a horrible, unnecessarily protracted kettle-whistle noise, and Xukun waits politely until he’s finished expelling every last ounce of air from his lungs. It takes quite some time. Impressive lung capacity seems to be a requirement for signing on with Yuehua, if Justin’s penchant for greeting people by unhinging his jaw like a snake and belting out an operatic high C one-and-a-half octaves outside his range is anything to go by.

“Cai Xukun, are you calling me old in my own room,” Zhengting fumes. “The door is _right there_ —”

“Hey, hey—” Xukun laughs, his hands moving up, placatory. Are they close enough to be joking around with each other like this? Probably not, but the illusion of it is nice, nonetheless. They’ll have to be, anyway, when the filming for their upcoming dorm life reality show starts in a week. “I didn’t mean it! Your, um, youthful energy, it’s really just emanating off you…”

Zhengting hums. He stands up, tossing his phone on top of the rumpled covers. The screen flashes insistently on, off, on again; Xukun catches a glimpse of WeChat notifications flooding in and then pushing themselves off the screen, too quickly to make out.

“Uh,” Xukun says. “Your phone…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Zhengting says. A fond moue turning the corners of his mouth downwards. “It’s just an old friend of mine, he’s always really chatty, even when he shouldn’t have time. But didn’t you want to talk? Come on, let’s go.”

Before Xukun has even finished processing this, Zhengting’s fingers have closed around his wrist and he’s pulling him out of the room. At first Xukun thinks he’s taking him to the kitchen, but soon he finds that they’re retracing the steps he’d taken just earlier, until they end up in front of a very familiar doorway. Unlike Xukun, though, Zhengting doesn’t hesitate before barging in with a flourish of the hand that’s needlessly dramatic, given that there’s nobody else around to see it.

“This is my room,” Xukun says.

“It is,” Zhengting agrees, wandering into the bathroom and rifling through the vanity cabinet. He draws out a sheet mask from Xukun’s skincare stash between his index and middle fingers like a blade, and passes a critical eye over the packaging, which appears to meet with his approval, since he purses his lips and tears the foil open.

“Make yourself at home,” Xukun mutters. He raises his voice. “Why… are we in my room?”

“Because I don’t know when Justin will be back,” Zhengting says. Xukun grimaces as he fishes the mask out and slaps it onto his face, tapping his fingers around his eye sockets in concentric circles. “But Zhangjing will probably be staying out as long as possible, right? So we aren’t going to be interrupted here.”

“You didn’t have to say it like that,” Xukun says.

Zhengting beams, which is a terrifying sight with the mask on, before he hurriedly composes himself again, hands flying up to readjust the sheet where it’s come loose around his mouth. “What did you actually want to talk about? I know there must have been _something_.”

Unspoken: _we don’t usually talk._ Back during the show their social circles tended not to intersect, largely because being around Zhengting made him inexplicably nervous, though it wasn’t as if he didn’t like Zhengting. He liked him just fine. They worked well together, which was about as much as you could ask for from anyone. It was just that disconcerting feeling of looking at something close enough to strike you as familiar but too different to actually recognise in any greater detail than that. In some ways they were exactly the same; in others Zhengting was utterly incomprehensible, and the gap between the two kept him uneasy all through filming. But the urge to seek Zhengting out, to match up their inverse histories, was implacable. Still is, even now.

Xukun worries the hem of his shirt between his thumb and his forefinger. “It’s been a week,” he says. “When is it going to start feeling real?”

“Ah, I think you’d know the specifics of that better than me,” Zhengting says.

That’s fair enough, Xukun supposes. He’s got an almost-debut, a debut that crashed and burned, and now this one under his belt. Hopefully this is the time idolhood sticks. He isn’t sure how many chances he has left.

“Alright,” Xukun says. “Then do you think—” He pauses. Considers the heft of the words in his mouth. “Do you think that we—deserve it?”

“Do we deserve it? I think we do,” Zhengting says, gaze even. “Do we deserve it more than the people who didn’t make it in? Of course not. Everyone worked hard. We were just lucky enough to have it pay off.”

Luck, that the editing had been generous to them. Luck, that they’d netted fanbases dedicated enough to get them over the line. As far divorced from their own capabilities as it could be. The knowledge should smart. But hearing it said out loud is comforting, somehow. The blame finally apportioned, and now he can start working through it.

“You didn’t need me to tell you, though,” Zhengting continues, some odd edge to his voice. “I’m sure you already knew.”

Xukun shuts his eyes. “I wanted to hear it from you,” he says. Waits three careful breaths before opening his eyes again, and whatever reaction Zhengting might have had to the words has since settled back into neutrality. Belatedly, it occurs to him that it would have been obscured by the mask, anyway.

“But why?” Zhengting says. He sounds more frustrated than confused. “Why should it matter more coming from me?”

“I don’t know,” Xukun says, trying to inject some levity into his voice. “Your, like, leaderly vibes—”

“I think you’re a better leader than I could ever be.”

The hem of Xukun’s shirt slips out from between his fingers. “That’s—where did you even—that’s just not _true_ ,” Xukun says, unsettled. “How can you say that? I was a team leader, what, twice—you’ve been the Yuehua leader for—years, or however long—” 

Zhengting’s smile is a thin white line, barely visible through the sheet. “It’s a moot point anyway,” he says. With the mask on, all Xukun has to go off is his tone of voice, carefully excised of any note that isn’t light or lilting. “Our brave and beautiful leader Rui-gē took the burden off our hands.”

There’s the bathroom light that Zhengting hadn’t bothered to switch off before and the light filtering in from the hallway outside, but they’re still standing here in the dark. How useless. For once, Xukun doesn’t know what to say, even though the honesty lies closer than ever to the surface.

“I’m glad I’m not leader,” Zhengting says, at last. “Really, I am. This is what I was hoping for.”

Zhou Rui is the kindest out of them all and Xukun knows Zhengting loves him just as much as he does, just as much as everyone does, but he also knows the ache of the old perfectionism insisting he could do things better if he just took them into his own hands. The demand for more from himself. Responsibility is a hard thing to relinquish. Surely, if anything, this must be something else he and Zhengting share.

“Did you always?” Xukun says. “Hope for things to turn out like this, I mean.” Whatever  _this_ encompasses.

“Does it matter? Whether or not I did before, if I do now?”

Xukun hesitates. “No,” he says slowly. “I guess it doesn’t.”

Something about the way Zhengting holds himself eases. He exhales, peels the sheet mask off. Folds it up again with swift, precise movements, even though it’s of no more use to him. It’s difficult to meet Zhengting’s eyes, now that there’s no barrier to it. 

“I do want to know, though,” Zhengting says. Incisive in its gentleness. “Why did you come to me, out of everyone? Why not—Ziyi, or Rui-gē?”

“I thought—” Xukun swallows. _Because you’re like me._ “I thought you’d get it. You, out of everyone. What it’s like.”

“The nation chose us. You and me and everyone else here. They wanted us to be in the group,” Zhengting says. “And you most of all.”

“I _know_ —don’t you think I know? But I still…”

And Zhengting surges forward to clasp his hands, and at the unexpected contact Xukun stills, then softens. The tension alchemising itself into warmth. All of that shameless unrestrained earnestness Xukun could never hope to imitate spilling over, shining out of Zhengting’s eyes, as if even this is easy for him, shouldering someone else’s fear like it’s second nature, or practised enough to become something adjacent. How can he say he is anything less than an ideal leader, an ideal dancer, an ideal version of himself?

They are both performers. They wouldn’t be if they didn’t love the stage. That love isn’t so easily borne or reciprocated, of course. But here in the quiet dark, Zhengting’s fingers folded around his own, the weight of it is a little lessened.

“Hey, listen to me,” Zhengting says. Sincerity in every syllable. “I’m on your side too, okay? I’m cheering for you. Don’t forget that.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on twitter [@juncheolsoo](https://twitter.com/juncheolsoo) and also [cc](https://curiouscat.me/inheritance), come say hi!


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